Circular Economy Strategy Launch With Minister Chris Steel
September 2023
Recently, we were honoured to welcome Minister Chris Steel to Thor’s Hammer to launch the new ACT Circular Economy Strategy.
It’s exciting to see and be a part of this important, game-changing progress; the strategy will be very important to addressing major social and environmental issues in the ACT like reducing waste, pollution and energy use and avoiding materials shortages.
The launch day was particularly timely given the huge previous week had by our hardworking recycling team at Thor’s Hammer, receiving about 5 semi loads or 100 tons of timber! We got a huge truckload from the demolition of the Jindabyne police station, 20 tons from a QLD factory demolition and 80 tons from Sydney houses. Huge week!
Check out the full ACT Circular Economy Strategy and Action Plan 2023-2030.
The Circular Economy in Action at Thor’s Hammer & Around the ACT
At Thor’s Hammer we currently save over 1500 tons of these timbers from landfill each year and employ 30 people designing and making building products, joinery and furniture from recycled timber. The timbers we recycle are mostly Australian hardwoods which were originally sawn from old growth forests. They are of a quality which you don’t see in new timbers these days.
Making higher quality products and keeping materials in use as long as possible is really important to creating a circular economy. Recycling building timbers or any other product takes a lot of energy and effort, and you also lose a proportion of the original materials to waste each time.
We are focussed on making the highest quality products from our recycled timber resource. For example, we give all the furniture we make a lifetime warranty.
In the ACT we have many innovative businesses working to help develop a circular economy.
We work with a number of building companies who save and reuse building and demolition waste including (just to name a few) 360 Building, 35 Degrees, Brucic Constructions, Green House and Lighthouse Architecture, we have the local brewer we head over to after work on a Friday Capital Brewing massively reducing their energy use and successfully going carbon neutral, and we also have companies like Goterra and Capital Scraps working innovatively on food waste. Community organisations like Vinnies and Lids for Kids are also doing a lot of good work as well.
We’re looking forward to seeing an ACT Circular Economy strategy that will give help for these innovative businesses and community organisations to grow, and put in place incentives for people to purchase longer lasting and easily reusable or recyclable products.
Photography: Freya Brent